If you study enough fight scorecards, a pattern emerges: judges tend to disagree the most in the late rounds, particularly in championship fights that go the full 12. In rounds 10, 11, and 12 — when fatigue sets in for the fighters and the stakes are highest — it’s common to see wide variance in how each judge views the action.
This isn’t just anecdotal. Statistical trends across dozens of high-level contests — whether they end in a unanimous, majority, or split decisions — show judges are more likely to diverge in their scoring during the final three rounds than in earlier ones.
Why Does This Happen?
1. Fighter Behavior Changes
Late rounds often see fighters alter their approach:
-The fighter ahead may become more defensive or cautious
-The trailing fighter tends to press harder, increasing output — but not always effectiveness
These shifts make the action more ambiguous. What one judge views as smart defense, another may see as coasting. A late rally might look like desperation to one judge and effective aggression to another.
2. Mental Fatigue
By the championship rounds, judges have been locked into a sustained concentration task for upwards of 40 minutes. Even with training, prolonged attention demands can lead to:
-Decreased sensitivity to subtle differences in clean punching
-Over-reliance on visible aggression or crowd reaction
-Greater variance in interpretation of close exchanges
3. Narrative Influence
Judges are not immune to momentum. As the story of the fight unfolds, a subconscious sense of who “deserves” the round can creep in. In very close rounds, this narrative framing can tip the score one way or another — inconsistently across judges.
4. Pressure and Stakes
In a tight contest, the championship rounds can carry perceived extra weight. While all rounds are scored equally on paper, rounds 10–12 often feel decisive, leading judges to “lean in” to different cues when making their calls.
What the data shows
To get a clearer sense of this pattern, I compiled round-by-round scorecard data from multiple high-profile 12-round fights across the past 20 years, using:
-BoxRec.com (official scorecards)
-CompuBox Round Breakdown Summaries
-Fan and media post-fight scorecard aggregators (such as Reddit’s r/Boxing and Bloody Elbow)
This analysis involved counting how often all three judges agreed on a round versus split decisions.
The results lined up with what many judges have suspected for years:
-Early rounds (1–4) tend to have higher agreement among judges (around 70–80%)
-Mid rounds (5–8) show moderate divergence (60–70%)
-Late rounds (9–12) have the highest rates of disagreement, with some rounds seeing all three judges score them differently
Research supports the pattern
This growing divergence isn’t random — it’s the natural result of what’s happening inside the ring and inside the judges’ minds.
Recent studies help explain the dynamic. In “They Were Robbed! Scoring by the Middlemost to Attenuate Biased Judging in Boxing”, researchers Stuart Baumann and Carl Singleton point out that close fights tend to hinge on marginal rounds — exactly the kind of ambiguous late rounds where disagreement spikes. They propose a “majority-rounds rule” to reduce the impact of late-round divergence and bias.
Similarly, “Modeling Perceived and Real Bias in Combat Sports Scoring” highlights how perception shifts during a bout. Early impressions can “anchor” judges’ expectations, while fatigue and crowd influence skew late-round evaluations. The result: what looks like an effective rally in round 12 may appear very different to each judge, especially in a tightly contested bout.
Bottom line
While every judge is trained to evaluate each round on its own merit, the conditions of the fight — both psychological and physical — make late-round consensus more elusive. That doesn’t mean the system is broken, but it does highlight the importance of awareness, accountability, and perhaps even future innovations in judging protocols.